Un-Curating
the Archive
Based on a Reference Collection by Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch (Part
II: 1990 – 2002)

Opening: 7. 12. 2017, 8 pm
Duration: 8. 12. 2017 – 18. 2. 2018

Although archives safeguard and preserve documents, they are not always
accessible to the public, or else access to these documents is
considerably restricted. So archives regulate the relationship between
the visible, the accessible, and the concealed. For this reason, it is
often exceedingly difficult to reconstruct the histories/stories of
institutions. Since the year 2017, Camera Austria has been exploring
its own archive in a different way: all archival material is being
presented in two exhibitions. The Vienna-based artists Nicole Six and
Paul Petritsch have developed a publication concept for this archive,
so that it will remain available as reference collection in Camera
Austria’s library after the exhibitions are over. In December, the
second part of “Un-Curating the Archive” will be opening, featuring
material from the years 1990 to 2002, the period during which Camera
Austria moved into the Eisernes Haus.

Boris Groys writes that an archive is suspended as soon as it becomes
the subject of an exhibition. Yet instead of transforming the archive
into an exhibition, Six & Petritsch turn the exhibition space
itself into a site for viewing and probing the archive. With its
structure and appearance remaining intact to the greatest possible
extent, the project aims—with this gesture of public disclosure—to give
something back to the public, to restitute the archive in a certain
sense, to transform it into a common space, without holding anything
back and thus freeing it up for new interpretations. Through this
gesture, the work that formed this archive ultimately has its own say.